It would kind of defeat the purpose of a HDD security lock if the manufacture maintained a default password.

Its true though, master passwords exist and are a documented part of the ATA spec, some have been leaked, others have been easily broken.

There are also liability issues.... can anyone prove that they own the data on the drive?

I have the original retail box and drive, surely that would be enough. Either way, I wouldn't expect a manufacturer to unlock the drive for an individual, but more importantly law enforcement. For an individual customer I would expect them to offer to secure erase/reset the drive.

The method I posted above to bypass the hard-drive password comes from the author of HDDerase itself.

Zaq, I haven't had a chance to try out your suggestion but I will soon. The instructions look like they are for drives that are in a security locked state, rather than just drives that have a password...I'm not sure it will work, but I'll try it tomorrow.

enable bios to boot from the bootable media the HDDerase is on ie floppy or USB stick

(PM me if you need easy 15 second info on making a bootable USB stick)

In the bios the boot up method must be changed from AHCI or RAID back to simple IDE

Use a PC with IDE and SATA support on motherboard and make sure the SSD is connected to one of the 4 primary SATA motherboard connectors if there are more than 4 SATA connectors. The HDDerase only recognised drives on the primary 4 slots, so if your drive does not show at the drive selection screen, reboot and change SATA connector on the motherboard.

dbavaria

I pretty sure this method will work

I had a brand new 2tb Hard drive for my kid's PC and a few weeks later I wanted to partition and reinstall with a newer OS

I used HDDerase and kept getting stuck with the same problem you are having even after the reboot.

I had used HDerase dozens of time prior to this and never had this problem, so I read the author's README file and found the solution ie remove the power wire upto the A prompt and then reattach it when the A prompt is visible

(C prompt if using a bootable USB stick which i now use for everything that requires a bootable media)

As I suspected earlier, HDDErase does not work for drives that are password locked. It basically says "The drive is locked..." then gives a set of options to unlock with user/master password before it can continue. As I pointed out earlier, this is documented behavior of HDDErase because this is just how the ATA Password works: